The Oxford Book of Ages

By Sally Sampson and Anthony Sampson

Book Overview

This ingenious and original anthology of quotations, compiled by Anthony Sampson and Sally Sampson, brings together the wit and wisdom of some of the more remarkable figures of the past and present, as they pause to reflect on their achievements or aspirations and on what it means to be a certain age.
If you wish to find your experiences shared, or your fears and hopes for the future confirmed, turn to any age for the expression of views by novelists, poets, painters and musicians, scientists, doctors, and sociologists. Profound truths as well as ironic observations from the diaries, letters, biographies, and autobiographies of contributors as diverse as Cicero and Ogden Nash, Picasso and Mozart, Goethe and Churchill emerge to enlighten us.
Personal memories and educators' and psychoanalysts' theories on the early years contrast with more spontaneous reactions such as that of Queen Victoria to her grandchild--"An ugly baby is a very nasty object." From the traumas of adolescence to the first intimations of mortality in the twenties and thirties, the imaginative thinker runs riot; the lean years of middle age prove a time of readjustment for many, but not all agree with Charles Peguy that "forty is a terrible age." Old age means a time of rage and regrets for some, but for others the time of greatest happiness, serenity, or achievement.
Reading these pages may encourage you to proclaim your age or to hide it; whatever you decide, you will realize that you are in good company.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192822446
• ISBN13: 9780192822444
• Release Date: December 1988
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.7" x 0.4" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

A thoughtfully done anthology

For each age of the persons life, the editors Anthony and Sally Sampson have gathered significant quotations.They have chosen from a variety of excellent sources .Their work has an excellent introduction in which they reflect on the whole course of life's ages. Most often their entries are not simply token significations of the age involved but rather real reflections of what the person felt at that particular age of their life. Some examples from the Age Sixty- two. " I nevwer wake without finding life more insignificant than it was the day before. .. My great misery is recollecting the scene of twenty years past, and then all on a sudden dropping into the present. " Swift " I am spending delightful afternoons in my graden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older I feel everything departing , and I love everything with more passion." Zola " No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year." Cicero "We are a pair of old derelicts drifting around, now, with some of our passengers gone and the sunniness of others in eclipse." Twain to W.D. Howells